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Enron Mail |
Clayton,
We can discuss your request when I come back to the office on Monday. Regarding the trip to Portland. Such a trip requires an explicit prior permission from your boss, myself in his absence, or Stinson in my and Vasant's absence. In case you did not ask for such a permission before, the request is denied. Vince Clayton Vernon @ ENRON 07/20/2000 03:12 PM To: Vasant Shanbhogue/HOU/ECT@ECT cc: Vince J Kaminski/HOU/ECT@ECT Subject: status Vasant- I hope you had a wonderful vacation back home, and are rested and recovered from the long flight back. I wanted to give you an update of the EOL project, the Gas Model, and of my intentions here at Enron. Software (in compiled C on the Unix platform) has been developed and debugged to listen to the EOL trades, process them, book them, and file them away. In addition, software has been developed and debugged to mark these to market on a continual basis, and to store the entirety of open positions on EOL in a dynamic matrix facilitating analysis. IT has yet to get back with me on how the software can be informed of those trades ultimately rejected for credit purposes. These data files are stored in a format for reading by Excel or by SAS, for which I have written the data step program and basic tabulation routines elucidating the structure of the data. I am in the process of documenting all of this for you. With regards the Gas Model and its slow performance on the Compaq, Dell has agreed to loan me one of their competing machines to the Compaq, to see if the performance issue of the LP is related to the Compaq. I have been researching this issue with IT here and with Compaq and Dell. The new machine will be here any day now (no financial obligation to anyone), and I will be able to immediately ascertain whether the problem the model is having is Compaq-specific. I am also in the process of documenting the Gas Model for you. I've tried to do my best for you, Vasant, but I have been frustrated by not only the death of my mother but some internal systems in IT here. Just the other day, SAS could not open a full query of the EOL database because there wasn't enough free space on the server's hard drive for the workfiles. In discussing some of these issues with some good friends of mine in power trading, people whom I have known for over 10 years, they indicated they were ubiquitous here. The power traders have similar PC's to my new one, and they have complained from Day 1 that theirs are slower than their old ones. Also, there remains a large frustration with the development of data warehouses; during my brief tenure here IT has gone through two differing proposals as to how to address this. When I have been told of tools available for real-time data harvesting, my requests for such have typically been met with "well, we have it, but we haven't really tested it yet." An example is the weather: we still do not record to disk the hourly NWS observations from the GOES satellite. My interests here are to help Enron to do well, because I will do well only if Enron does well. These aren't empty words- my IRA is 100% invested in the Enron stock fund. I believe my best contributions to Enron will be in the areas of systems as well as modeling, and the difficulty working in the Research Group, in terms of systems development, is that, frankly, few people at Enron seem to care what a researcher thinks about our systems. We aren't directly generating revenues for Enron, and we aren't really their customers, except in our relatively small deparrtmental infrastructure expenses. As it happens, Power Trading posted an opening for a Modeling and Forecasting person, and I spoke with them and they asked me to take the job, reporting to George Hopley. It is a wonderful opportunity for me, Vasant, as they are interested in large system modelng of power grids as well as improving their traders' access to real-time fundamentals data. I was completely candid with Kevin Presto regarding my shortcomings here in Research- I told him you were disgusted with me because I repeatedly failed to meet time deadlines. They also understand I have yet to be at Enron for 1 year, and thus may only bid on a job with your permission. We agree the move is good for Enron; we all work for Enron, and your acquiescence to the move does not endorse it but merely permit it. They are comfortable with me- they have known me for years as a hard worker, honest and unpretensive. They have already ordered a state-of-the-art Unix workstation and server for me, and they have told me they will commit whatever resources are necessary for me to be successful, including hiring an Analyst to work for me. And, I have already been able to teach their analysts improved techniques for data harvesting and analysis I have learned here. So, I am requesting your permission to bid for this job opening. It would be a lateral move in position and salary, and I would commit to you to help you in any way possible in the future with regards the Gas Model or the EOL database. I will continue to work on their improvement, and complete their documentation. As it happens, I am away on Enron business in Portland Monday and Tuesday, and will be back Wednesday. I had wanted to talk face-to-face instead of by email, but Enron business supercedes- I am on a team designing the data warehouse for floor trader support. Clayton.
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